


Between the Falling Angel and the Rising Ape

by rain_sleet_snow



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Steampunk, During Canon, M/M, okay steampunk-ish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-21
Updated: 2017-01-21
Packaged: 2018-09-19 00:25:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9409154
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow
Summary: From the stratosphere to Jakku is a long way to fall.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [eriah211](https://archiveofourown.org/users/eriah211/gifts).



> Written for Eriah211, who said she liked steampunk and Finn/Poe, in fandom_stocking. I tried to make it steampunk-ish but rapidly realised that Star Wars is not a bazillion miles off steampunk itself; a lot of the changes, I think, would be as much aesthetic as anyone else. Anyway. I tried.
> 
> I kind of don't agree with the way Poe talks about droids/automata here. But I think it's fully plausible that in the galaxy of restraining bolts and wiping droids' memories, even Poe who cares so much about BB-8 might instinctively fall back on similar ideas, and there wasn't a huge amount of space to critique in the ficlet.

_Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where **the falling angel meets the rising ape**._

_-Hogfather, Terry Pratchett_

 

From the stratosphere to Jakku was a long way to fall, and even the First Order's clockwork fighter planes did not survive well.

 

What about the First Order's clockwork fighters? Poe wondered, waking up at one end of a trail of destruction left by the falling plane. He had always thought the stormtroopers in their white plate, moving as one, thinking as one, were the next best thing to automatons. Some people thought they were automatons; those people had not shot as many stormtroopers as Poe Dameron.

 

Automatons didn't bleed. They didn't sweat with fear or laugh with joy. They didn't take a name you gave them and turn it over in their mouth, curious; they didn't shed decades of conditioning like a second skin.

 

You couldn't condition an automaton. Automatons' worlds were purely factual, and it took great skill to present them with a false world, complete in every detail. General Organa said it was both childish and a waste of time and effort, and Poe believed her.

 

Poe unbuckled the harness that had become a parachute and got to his feet. He knew the sands of Jakku when he saw them, but he didn't know where the rest of the plane was, or where Finn was.

 

 _FN-2187_. They had given an automaton's name to a beating heart.

 

Poe climbed the nearest ridge, and saw the plane smeared along the desert like oil under a careless thumb. His heart hurt.

 

You couldn't tell Poe Dameron that automatons didn't mourn; Poe knew how BB-8 would have taken his capture, his almost certain death. Poe didn't cry, for he had no water to waste on tears, and he didn't turn back to search for Finn, for he had no time, and he could see no life, and he had a duty - to the General, to the Resistance, to the galaxy.

 

To make Finn's death mean something, he told himself, and the words were sour in his mouth.

 

He felt more like the automaton he would once have called Finn than he did like a human; but duty was too strong, and he stayed on his appointed path, and his heart ached more with every step.

 

And yet -

 

_Poe Dameron! You're alive!_

_-_ all the air comes rushing back into Poe's lungs where he stands on D’Qar concrete, his pulse drums so hard he feels like he's been kicked in the chest, and there is that smile that no artificer can replicate, those bright eyes no craftswoman could copy, that beating heart the First Order couldn't quiet. Finn's arms are warm, his grip is strong, and he's more alive in this moment than Poe has ever been in his entire life.

 

From the stratosphere to Jakku was a long way to fall.

 

Poe and Finn, they rise.

 


End file.
